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The armed conflict between Britain and the two Boer republics of
Transvaal and Orange Free State in South Africa, often called the Boer
War, began on 11 October 1899 and ceased on 31 May 1902. Depending on
one's point of view and point in time, this war is also known as the
Boer Insurrection, Second Anglo-Boer War, Second War for Freedom,
South African War, Second South African War, Boer War II, or English
War. At the time of The New Age,
it also was called the “last gentleman's war” and
“a white man's war.” By whatever name, this was
England's last great colonial conflict and an important precursor for
its participation in World War I.

Britons still argue about what went wrong in its execution, even
though they were ultimately victorious. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who
experienced the war as a volunteer doctor, wrote that its events “stirred the minds of our people more than anything
since the Indian Mutiny, and humiliated our arms as they have not been
humiliated in this [nineteenth] century” (Conan Doyle 21). The fact that some 450,000 British and Empire troops
were needed to defeat a population of half that size (of whom only a
fraction, 50,000, were in arms as part-time soldiers) put England on
notice about its state of military preparedness. For the defeated
South Africans the war has remained a rallying point for nationalistic
sentiment.

The centenary of this conflict has prompted new considerations of
the war's causes, results, and implications for the British
Empire. These studies indicate that the conflict was, in fact, a civil
war that involved the entire population across the length and breadth
of South Africa and caused fissures in the Afrikaner and African
societies. People of color fought on all sides, sometimes under duress
and sometimes from conviction, and suffered. Diamonds and gold played
large roles in the conflict's beginnings, along with race, nationalism
and international power politics—all of which were nuanced by gender
and class.

Three people have been held, on occasion, responsible for starting
the war: Joseph Chamberlain, then Britain's Colonial Secretary; Paul
Kruger, president of the South Africa Republic; and Alfred Milner,
British High Commissioner in the Cape Colony from 1897-1905. It now
appears that the British forced the war in 1899 to gain control of the
Transvaal, the independent republic where Boers had political control
and where gold mining was a major new industry. Since the latter part
of the 19th century gold had been the major underpinning of the
world's expanding commerce. By 1890 London was the financial center of
the world's trade, and a steady supply of the world's stock of gold
was critical for maintaining this position. Nearly 100,000 migrant
black workers from the subcontinent were working in the gold mines of
the Rand, along with 12,000 whites.

Rivalry between the Boers and British settlers in these areas had
been going on for some 50 years as Britain sought to consolidate its
control and the Dutch-descended settlers strove to maintain their
autonomy and culture. At the time of onset of hostilities, there were
about 500,000 people of British extraction in the Cape Colony and
Natal and fewer than 250,000 people of Dutch extraction in the
Transvaal, which was independent, and in the Orange Free State, which
had partial independence. The Cape Colony also had approximately
500,000 Coloureds. There also was an Asian community of 100,000—most of whom lived in Natal. So this war was fought in a region where
white people made up only one-fifth of the population. In 1899 there
were approximately one million whites in South Africa, compared to
four million black Africans. During the last three decades of the
nineteenth century, Britain had subdued and incorporated the remaining
independent African chiefdoms and states in the subcontinent.

Dutch people had been in South Africa since 1652, when they first
settled at Cape of Good Hope to supply ships to and from the Dutch
colonies in the East Indies. By 1814, when the Cape Colony was added
to the British Empire as the result of the Napoleonic wars, some
30,000 Dutch, French and German colonists were in South Africa. In
1820 5,000 British emigrants landed there, settling on the eastern
border of Cape Colony.

To escape what seemed to be English encroachments, as well as the
freeing of their slaves in the 1830s, some 5,000 Dutch settlers, or
about a quarter of its population, left the coastal areas with an
equivalent number of slaves. They migrated in Conestoga-style wagons
into the hinterlands, ostensibly to maintain their way of life as
herdsmen, hunters, and farmers. This Great Trek soon became part of
the national saga, with its participants called voortrekkers
(pioneers). They moved into what became Transvaal and Orange Free
State, leaving the coastal areas of Cape Colony to British settlers
and a substantial number of remaining Dutch settlers. Soon Natal
became a British colony, and pushed out many of its Boers into the two
Boer republics in the north. Thus was set the pattern of two
English-speaking provinces in the south and two Afrikaans-speaking
provinces in the north. By time of the war, some Dutch families had
been in South Africa for seven generations.

Diamonds were discovered near Kimberley in 1872. In 1877 Britain
took over the Transvaal, declaring it a British crown colony. The
Transvaal Boers protested, finally rising in rebellion in 1880: the
First Anglo-Boer War or Transvaal war. The Boers humiliated the
British in the Battle of Majuba Hill, and Gladstone sued for
peace. The Transvaal was handed back to the Boers. The Boers
established alliances with Germany; this made Britain nervous.

Then gold was discovered in the Transvaal hills in 1886. A gold
rush ensued, with engineers, miners and merchants from England,
America and European countries flocking to the scene. The Transvaal
was delighted with its overnight wealth, but reluctant to grant
political power to the “Uitlanders” who were needed
for the industry but perceived as ready to overwhelm local
culture. Frustrated, the Uitlanders orchestrated an ill-fated
uprising, masterminded by Cecil Rhodes himself and led by his
physician, Dr. Leander Starr Jameson, in late 1895-early 1896. This
invasion of the Transvaal with an armed force, Jameson's Raid, failed
and confirmed the Dutch-descended Africans' suspicions about Britain's
motives. After a series of bluffs orchestrated by Chamberlain and Boer
ultimatums in response, the two Boer provinces declared war on 11
October 1899.

There were three distinct phases to this war of two years and eight
months. Initially, the Boer republican fighters were successful in
three major offensives. Their commandos (militia-like groups of
informal mounted fighters) occupied northern Natal and besieged
Ladysmith, invaded the Cape, and struck westwards to lay siege to the
British garrisons in Kimberley and Mafeking. On all three fronts—at
Colenso, the Stormberg and Magersfontein—the Boers achieved serious
defeats of British forces during the “black week”
of mid-December 1899.

In the second phase, heavy imperial reinforcements and changes in
command (Lord Roberts of Kandahar as Commander-in-Chief and Lord
Kitchener of Khartoum as his chief of staff) turned things
around. Imperial troops were able to relieve the besieged towns of
Ladysmith, Kimberley and Mafeking. On 13 March 1900 Roberts's soldiers
occupied Bloemfontein, the capital of the Orange Free State, and on 24
May the province was annexed, to be known as the Orange River
Colony. On 31 May British troops entered Johannesburg, and on 5 June,
Pretoria. On 1 September 1900 the Transvaal was annexed to the British
crown and the war seemed over. Roberts returned to England.

Then the guerrilla war began in earnest. Under the leadership of
Louis Botha, Christiaan de Wet, J. C. Smuts and J. H. de la Rey, the
Boers stepped up their use of small mobile military units. These were
able to capture supplies, disrupt communications and inflict
casualties on the army of occupation and largely escape capture
themselves. Their success induced draconian measures in response,
especially after Kitchener replaced Roberts as
Commander-in-Chief.

The first response was a scorched earth policy designed to deny
guerrilla fighters the sustenance and supplies provided by the
civilian population. This involved burning some 30,000 farms, savage
treatment of the civilian population, and a system of war that the
twentieth century soon recognized as the policy of “total
war.” It caused havoc with African farming methods and
dispossessed untold numbers of families. After March 1901 the British
developed a gigantic grid of some 8,000 blockhouses and 3,700 miles of
wire-mesh fencing guarded by 50,000 troops. This system allowed
British troops to “drive” the commandos into
corners, much like hunting quail. It also further displaced Boer and
African families alike and soon there was the problem of what to do
with the refugees.

The answer was concentration camps, a technique developed by the
Spanish in Cuba during the Spanish-American war. In all, there were 18
such camps before the end of the war, including four separate camps
for women and children of black Africans. Almost 28,000 Boer
civilians, mainly children under the age of 16 and women, died in
British concentration camps, along with a reported 14,154 Africans
dying in separate camps. Altogether, at least 42,000 people died in
the camps. By comparison, a total of 22,000 imperial soldiers and over
7,000 republican fighters were killed in the conflict.

The reformer Emily Hobhouse (1860-1926), sister of Leonard
Hobhouse, exposed the horrors of the concentration camps to an
unwilling British public. Eventually Kitchener had to revise this
policy and Milner took over administration of the camps. In many ways,
the camps now serve as the war's most memorable legacy.

Hobhouse was not alone in attempting to influence public opinion in
the conduct of this war. New technologies made it possible for members
of the press to cover the war in ways unavailable in the Crimean
War. Photography and telegraphy had improved, printing technology was
more available, and moving picture film provided the British and world
public a front-row view of the British exploits. Thanks to improved
transportation, war correspondents and other writers looking for
material were able to travel with the troops. Rudyard Kipling, Winston
Churchill, Rider Haggard and Arthur Conan Doyle enhanced or—the case
of Churchill—their reputations on the war scene. The three long
famous sieges (Ladysmith, Kimberley, and Mafeking) as well as the slow
pace of the war allowed many participants to maintain diaries and
write letters. Personal narratives such as diaries, memoirs, letters
and after-the-fact histories abound.

Not all people in Britain accepted the necessity of this war to
maintain the empire or to ensure the safety of southern Africa for
British culture. W. T. Stead, editor of the Review of Reviews, was one of the most
outspoken dissenters on this topic. G. K. Chesterton was another,
arguing that the Boers had the right to defend their farms. That fiery
young Liberal MP, David Lloyd George, was one of the few speaking in
Parliament against the war. And even Henry Campbell-Bannerman, whose
rather offhand comment in 1901 deploring “methods of
barbarism” in reference to the concentration camps—for
which he was severely criticized—was able to become Prime Minister
eventually. A lot of British people perhaps sensed, beneath their
“jingoism,” that humanitarian concerns trumped
empire in the greater order of things.

The European press was largely anti-British. In South Africa and
Britain, the writer Olive Schreiner criticized Boer and Briton alike
for this nasty little war. In Italy, the writer Ouida (Louise De La
Ramée) exhorted the expatriate community to protest the war.

In the field, both sides used the latest long-range, high velocity,
small-bore repeating rifles and machine guns. Yet horses played a more
important role in the ranging over the countryside and in supply
lines. Britain had to scour its empire for the 400,346 horses, mules
and donkeys that it “expended” in supply lines,
pulling artillery, moving soldiers and machinery. The Boer commandos
were excellent horsemen and crack shots, able to live in the saddle,
and were operating on their home turf with horses that could survive
on tough veldt grass. Railroads played a huge part in supply and troop
movement, while steam engines and oxen were used to haul wagons and
guns.

With the Treaty of Vereeniging on 31 May 1902, Britain assumed
final control over Cape Colony and put the Afrikaner provinces on a
schedule for inclusion in what, in 1910, became—with Natal—Union
of South Africa as a British colony. Historians have largely claimed
that the British negotiated away fair treatment of Africans in
hammering out an accommodation with the Boer provinces. This
assessment has been recently challenged, claiming instead that the
British liberal, sometimes missionary, impulse regarding indigenous
native claims was just as racist and perhaps as destructive to native
cultures as was the Boer caste system. These issues merit further
exploration.

Under whatever name, the Second South African War forced Britain to overhaul
its defense apparatus, reform its administrative structures, and reform the
army itself—all of which helped prepare it for World War I in 1914.